Daily Mail, 17 January 2005

This has gone way beyond tragedy or even farce. It has become an institutionalised national fraud, with untold consequences for the nation.

Pupils have been awarded a B grade in maths GCSE despite scoring only 17 per cent, while those scoring 45 per cent were awarded an A. This risible grading by the OCR exam board follows a similar decision by its rival Edexcel.

Thus candidates who would once have failed are now emerging with top grades. Clearly, such pupils will be unable to cope with the A-level work that these grades may mislead them into tackling.

Yet the government is forcing schools and universities to produce record increases in higher qualifications. The result is that both A-level and in turn degree courses are sharply dumbing down to accommodate ill-equipped students and give them increasingly bogus qualifications.

Actual achievement is being redefined into absurdity. Last week’s school league tables revealed that schools were being awarded more points for passes in cake decoration or gardening than in maths or science. This is presumably what the government means when it parrots its oxymoronic cry of ‘excellence for all’.

What we are witnessing is nothing less than the disintegration of our education system, the destruction of standards from top to bottom, and the dismemberment of the meaning of knowledge itself.

The evidence is all around us. Universities are having to hold remedial courses in elementary facts and skills. Half the nation has no idea what the Holocaust was.

One quarter of primary school leavers can’t write properly. A Ministry of Defence study showed that half of all new recruits had the reading and writing skills of 11 year-olds, raising fears that they would not be able to operate the new generation of ‘smart’ weapons systems.

And that’s just the basics — never mind the higher achievements of science or scholarship, inventive or thinking skills that are required of the world’s fourth most powerful nation.

We now have in Ruth Kelly a bright eyed and bushy-tailed new Education Secretary. Yet in her first major speech, she boasted of the ‘enormous progress’ made in transforming state schools since 1997, and subscribed to the lethal egalitarian delusion of ‘universal excellence’. Oh dear.

Ministers and governments come and go. But with every one of them, our education crisis has deepened.

Over the years, subjects such as maths, history or geography have been progressively emptied of content. The result is that more and more pupils — especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds who most rely on school — know little, are unable to think for themselves and cannot distinguish between truth and lies.

Knowledge about the physical landscape in geography, or what actually happened in history, has been replaced by environmental propaganda and the doctrine that there are no historical truths, only opinions. The government is even backing an initiative — following ‘Black History Month’ — for ‘Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender History Month’, which will concentrate history teaching on the (allegedly) gay and lesbian lives of people such as Shakespeare or Florence Nightingale.

What does the supposedly traditional Ms Kelly think about this? For it is not education but brazen indoctrination. What a desperately bleak picture of moral and intellectual desolation this conjures up. What an abandonment of our children.

And the supposed guardians and policemen of education standards are among the leaders of this rout. Foreign language teaching, which was emasculated by the ideological animus against formal grammar, has all but disappeared from many schools altogether after the government weakened its compulsory element.

The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority has ordained that the GCSE science curriculum from 14-16 will teach ‘science lite’. Instead of learning the principles of physics or chemistry, pupils will be taught about the application of science to lifestyles — as well as being fed straight propaganda about its impact on society.

The justification is to make science ‘relevant to the 21st century’. This is in accordance with the government’s doctrine of ‘personalised learning’, which means that everything that is taught must be ‘relevant’ to the individual child.

This philosophy, of course, destroys the very basis of education which is all about exposing a child to what he or she does not already know. ‘Personalised’ or ’relevant’ education, by contrast, implicitly means that the child does not progress from the level at which he or she starts.

And the proposals in the Tomlinson report on A-level, now in Ms Kelly’s pending tray, amount to yet a further set of nails in the education coffin. For by measuring progress rather than attainment, reducing literacy and numeracy to ‘functional’ maths and English, and diluting A-level with voluntary work or sporting prowess, these will make a nonsense of examinations themselves.

In short, this is not so much an education policy as a cultural revolution. Knowledge and objectivity have been replaced by subjective opinion and feelings; overcoming obstacles and coping with setbacks or failure have been all but written out of the education script; and our society’s moral values are being systematically trashed in our schools.

How on earth has this happened?

Most fundamentally, for the past half century the education world has been captured by an ideology which seeks to undermine the values and traditions of western civilisation.

Education is all about transmitting knowledge and understanding of a culture, in order to root children in the world around them and to equip them with a set of route maps so that they can successfully make their way in it.

That concept has been replaced by a desire utterly to change this culture, to destroy its values and replace them by a deracinated free-for-all which repudiates all authority. This is what lies behind the ‘child-centred’ theories which have been abandoning children to ignorance and worse for decades.

The last Tory government, which understood the harm being done, never realised how completely the education system had been undermined. So all the Tories’ efforts to repair the damage were subverted from within.

This was then compounded by Labour’s obsession with ‘equality’ and its ruthless pursuit of the appearance of improvement, leading to our rampant grade inflation, ever more desperate lowering of standards and intimidation of our last remaining bastions of excellence in the universities to become factory farms of mediocrity.

As a result, progress in Britain has been put in to reverse. Exam papers taken by 11-year-olds applying for places to King Edward’s School in Birmingham in 1898 — asking candidates how characters such as Harold Hardrada, Saladin, or Frederick the Elector Palatine were connected with English history, or to analyse the grammatical structure of selected words and phrases — couldn’t be tackled by most of today’s A-level students, let alone our primary school-leavers.

One of the lessons of history is that the excesses of one century are often repaired by the next. But to do that, a society needs to be able to think, and thus to understand what has gone wrong. The terrifying thing about our education meltdown is that we are destroying the means by which our society can repair itself.

For if our country is not educated, our culture, economy and society simply cannot survive. Our education system was once the envy of the world. But now, it has become not only the motor of the ‘me’ society but, even more alarmingly, the instrument of cultural and social suicide.

Posted by melanie at January 17, 2005